Rewriting a historical event
To create a postmodern fiction which rewrites a historical incident
(Exercise 3), you need to decide with which period of history you want to
engage. The effect of rewriting an event in living memory will be distinct
from revisiting one from a previous era. The main difference will be that
most recent events have been recorded by—and filtered through—the
media, inevitably in a biased way.
You may need to research the period you are writing about. There is a
range of materials, such as academic articles on the period, newspapers
articles, biographies, and library and museum archives, which you can use
as the basis for this. However, the purpose behind rewriting will not be
that you faithfully replicate the facts, but that you imaginatively interact
with them. It is very easy to become so immersed in historical research that
the writing becomes wooden and bogged down in data. One way of avoid-
ing this is to use historical information as a resource, but only refer to it
intermittently while you are writing. Or use the material as a solid base,
but then make sure you transform it effectively.
There are a number of strategies you can use for rewriting a historical
episode:
- Rewrite a well-known historical event from the perspective of someone
who is on the margin of that event. This approach gives you the oppor-
tunity to bring out elements of the story suppressed in the official
historical accounts of it. - Choose a historical period or incident about which very little is known,
and use it as the basis for a creative text. The advantage here is that you
have a lot of imaginative flexibility in the way you portray the scenario. - Take a contemporary figure (such as a politician who is in power at the
moment), or a set of contemporary figures, and place them in a com-
pletely different historical context where they would have to face new
difficulties. There will be room here for satire and humour. - Portray a historical event through conflicting versions of that event. You
may wish to use different genres and modes of reporting, such as news-
paper reports and letters. Alternatively, or in addition, filter different
versions of the story through a number of narrators and focalisations. - Create a text which is based on the history of an imagined region. You
might want to produce an overlapping of real and unreal histories as
Salman Rushdie does in his novel Shame (1995) or Graham Swift in
Waterland (1992). - Choose a recent event which has been shown repeatedly on the TV.
Create a version which challenges the media rendition(s) of it. - Create a scenario which allows you to question the way we record and
146 The Writing Experiment